Defying Gravity

Curiously, while settling in to watch the show tonight, the announcer very clearly declared this to be the “Season Finale” of Defying Gravity. Now, I know for a fact that they shot 11 episodes of this show, and I know it’s been bleeding ratings since day one - the lowest ratings the show ever got was for the H2IK episode, which came in 34th place for the week, the highest they’ve ever done was the pilot, which came in at 21st for the week, which would be fairly lame during the season, but we’re in the dog days of summer here - there’s no competition.

Whole lot o’ hallucinating going’ on tonight. I suppose I could kvetch about them doing a Halloween episode in September, but then the Simpsons have been doing Halloween episodes in December for more than a decade now. I guess I’m used to it. That notwithstanding, however, I’m not sure how I feel about this episode, it’s a bit to character-heavy, and a bit too “Out of Gas” (Firefly reference) coming right on the heels of some other character-heavy episodes.

So here we are at the end of the first half of the season, and I find I’m much more invested in this show than I anticipated. Yeah, I’m not unaware of its failings, most of them related to the technical side of things, but I find I’m responding well to the very decompressed storytelling, the slow character arcs, the relaxed pace.

The show has been steadily getting better. I know some people have criticized the show as it tends towards melodrama more than SF, but the fact of the matter is that they’re living on a space ship, and they’ve got a lot of time to kill. Whether you want it or not, you’re going to get a lot of melodramatic crap, just ask anyone who’s ever lived in a Co-Ed dorm. This week in particular, the scale tilts in favor of the soap opera stuff, rather than the more traditional skiffy stuff, but truth be told, I actually kind of liked it.

Episode three wasn’t quite as good as the two they debuted last week, but mostly only due to the lack of any particular narrative tension. The ship wasn’t in peril, the crew weren’t in (imminent) peril, there’s not a lot of risk, hence not a lot of tension, but it was still a pretty solid episode, if rather low key. A character episode rather than a major arc episode. Still pretty as hell, well directed, solidly acted, if perhaps not exactly compelling.

Another interesting aspect of this show is that it’s a truly international project, with the US, Canada, the BBC, and a German company all sharing the funding and contracts for the show. Theoretically, at least, this makes it rather hard to cancel, simply because there are international contracts to consider, and one or more of the partners may decide to go ahead with the story, even if, say, Germany, or the US back out. Just interesting.

While there hasn’t been an amazing amount of pre-broadcast hyping for this show, and some people say that it’s already as dead as “Kings,” “Defying Gravity” is an interesting concept for a show: An international cast of talented, intelligent, and above-all attractive people trapped on a space ship for six years as they tour around the solar system. Some wags are already calling it “Greys’ Anatomy in Space,” and if you check the tags for this article, you’ll find that I myself am lumping it in to my “Estrogen in Space” category.

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